Hi @HerbieMan3B I’m Matt, porn / lust addict in recovery, and I walked most of the same path. I made the same “discovery” about “edging”. My disclosure to my wife was not so traumatic to her because I did it in consultation with the therapist at the sex addiction recovery clinic I attended. We did it in a trauma-informed way. (My wife and I still do marriage counselling there two or three times a year, for a checkin, and tune-up. 17 years now and still going strong. Been through some very tough times. That struggle and our work through that has created the resilient and empathetic marriage we have now.)
I define my addiction as lust because I discovered that for me it went much deeper than the surface behaviours of masturbation or watching pornography. It was about wilfulness, self-pity, resentment, and other harmful attitudes I had allowed to fester for decades.
I am now in a place where the desire to use my addiction behaviours does not come to me at all. For me that freedom has come through my daily simple recovery tasks in Sexaholics Anonymous (www.SA.org). There are other groups that work on recovery from lust and sex addictions too (Neal made a list here: Resources for our recovery - #64 by NealRecoveryCA)
Welcome to Talking Sober! We have a private thread for people recovering from this to talk through their experience. I’ll add you.